Nine books that imagine what a Black utopia could be

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Robertson's nonfiction debut is The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.

At Lit Hub the author tagged "nine key works that provide a window into the long history of Black utopian experiments, tracing it through political, social, and speculative lenses." One title on the list:

Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction

Painter examines the mass migration of Black Americans to Kansas following the Civil War, as they sought to establish new lives and secure land in the face of rising violence in the South. This story highlights the role migration has played in Black utopian thinking—a search for a place where freedom is not just granted but built.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, as the federal government withdrew its protections for freedpeople, the Southern landscape became increasingly hostile, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, racial terror, and the resurgence of white supremacist violence. The Exoduster Movement, which took place in the late 1870s, was one of the largest and most organized Black migrations of its time. Thousands of formerly enslaved people and their descendants left the South in search of refuge, with Kansas symbolizing the biblical “Promised Land.”

Painter’s work not only contextualizes this pivotal moment but also links it to the broader Black utopian impulse toward freedom, land ownership, and autonomy.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue